B. P. Rinehart

“When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation—for a lucky few—was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand—knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Zionism demands, as Levi Eshkol, prime minister of Israel during the 1960s, once put it, “the dowry, not the bride”—that is to say, the land without the Palestinians on”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark. I always imagined reparations as a rejection of plunder at large. And who in modern memory had been plundered more than the victims of the Holocaust? But my prototype was not reparations from a genocidal empire to its Jewish victims, but from that empire to a Jewish state. And what my young eyes now saw of that state was a world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy. I was seeking a world beyond plunder—but my proof of concept was just more plunder.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“...When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting--they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity. Without this criterion there can be no oppressive power, because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message